Newsbeat 1

Monday, June 06, 2005

Of the 8,908 notices to appear that the immigration court in nearby Harlingen issued last year to non-Mexicans, 8,767 failed to show up for their hearings, according to statistics compiled by the Justice Department's Executive Office of Immigration Review. That is a no-show rate of 98 percent

There have been too many instances of well intentioned money and supplies being diverted from where it is needed.In the short term, legitimate NGO's with good track records could distribute emergency relief , but if more is needed perhaps, the receiving country could open any books including offshore books to the scrutiny of the World Bank or IMF auditors to make sure money is not wasted or diverted.

With Paul Wolfowitz as the new head of the World Bank, there's a good chance that the money will end up where it's intended but controls should be in place- the oil for food is just one recent example of money being diverted when it was supposed to go to the vulnerable.They should be making sure precious monies go to preserving and fostering lives and not preserving opulent lifestyles of the few.

"Oh, well. “Everybody does it.” When this all got going, I said in this space that the indifference of Canadians in general and Ontarians in particular was the real issue, and it gives me no pleasure to have been proved so right so quickly. I flew back to Montreal from overseas the other day and the trolley dolly offered me a Globe and Mail. I made the mistake of accepting it. On the letters page, every Gomery-related missive was brimming with indignation . . . against Stephen Harper. Good grief, I wondered. What’s he been up to? Laundering money? Diverting public funds into party coffers? Whacking his enemies?"..............

"The contradiction is this: Europe assumes that Iran has been lying about its nuclear program for two decades, and invites the Iranians to stop lying. But to do that, they would first have to admit that they had been lying. The Europeans are asking Iran to stop doing what Iran insists it is not doing at all. Thus to satisfy the Europeans, Iran must first confess doing what it says it is not and then stop doing it in a verifiable way"....

"The American Institute for Economic Research — a Massachusetts Institute of Technology think tank which has been chronicling inflation trends since the 1930s — contends that inflation has become seriously understated because of the department's quality adjustments. In an example of a quality adjustment noted by the institute, the sticker price of a new car may go up by $200, but the department records no increase if it was due to $200 worth of air-bag improvements. "The increase may not show up in the price index, but it still shows up on your bill," said Kerry Lynch, research director of the institute. The quality adjustments "are one of the main reasons the CPI often differs from the price changes people observe," she said."